The performance advantages of a hardware-optimized column-oriented database over software-only rivals will be too pronounced for the latter to hold onto their market share. And though most appliance vendors eschew column-oriented approaches, preferring to tweak traditional row-oriented relational database management systems (RDBMS) for multidimensional online analytical processing, many will explore this alternative technique in order to eke out further performance improvements.

The growing demand for inexpensive analytic horsepower will also foster the development of subscription-based data warehouse services, also known as DW 2.0, Database 2.0, cloud databases and on-demand databases. Though not the first entrant in this new arena, Microsoft is the most prominent, having recently rolled out a limited beta of its hosted SQL Server Data Services (SSDS), which is slated for full production release in 2009.

Under SSDS, Microsoft hosts a subset of SQL Server's RDBMS functionality in support of analytics as well as transactional applications. Though it has not yet specifically optimized SSDS for analytics, Microsoft has stated that it plans to evolve the service in that direction.

As it becomes available from many service providers, DW 2.0 will offer an ever-expanding supply of inexpensive, plentiful analytic horsepower. Over the coming decade, software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers will begin to offer feature-complete, subscription-based business intelligence/data warehouse services for high-performance, high-volume, complex analytics. These clouds will leverage the full virtualized, distributed, scalable, grid-computing fabric that Microsoft, Google and other SaaS behemoths can bring to bear on data mining, performance optimization, and other compute- and data-intensive tasks.

Over time, we'll come to take DW 2.0 for granted. We'll call it up on demand, a utility for processing any and all decision-support tasks, large or small, throughout the business world or in our daily lives.